Cats

I'm glad Coco is still showing a preference for the indoors, because it is looking like another hundred-degree day. The bad news is that I have not seen Ash yet this morning. It is nothing to panic over, but it is unusual and I am a little worried.

The Would-Be Poet

I wrote out a first post for my life as a poet.

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It is time for a new beginning!

Bo is lying on his side and looks up toward me, and he gives a little mewling growl, as if to say, “Again? Wouldn’t it be better if we finished something first at least?”

I would love to. The problem is I don’t have anything going. And it is getting late. In less than two years I will be fifty. Granted, it is a little late to think of doing something with my life. This is the time when one is usually coasting to retirement and thinking about what one has accomplished, what one will leave behind.

Nevertheless, I am still alive and stirring a little. And I am still fixated on the idea of being a writer. Of course, it is probably this very fixation that has helped to keep me from going on with my life and doing something humble and appropriate to my station and talents, such as flipping burgers or stocking grocery store shelves. Regardless, making a serious appraisal of what I might hope to achieve, understanding that this may be my last grasp at the authorial brass ring, I think I must be a poet, if only because you merely need to string together a dozen words to make a poem. If I flourish with the verses, maybe I can go on to short stories, but it would probably be a good idea to focus on this first literary step.

Bo sits up, looking at me with his head askew, as if to say, “But I thought you gave up on being able to rhyme and beat out a meter, that you said it was like singing and dancing, and it was just something you couldn’t develop a feeling for.”

I remember. But I want to try doing something. One more time. Just so that I can say I did my best.

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The plan died before I even finished it. If I really want to write poems, I can always do so, I suppose. But I was obviously just looking for another line of self-narrative and it would be more about trying to be a poet than about actual poetry writing. And I cannot see staying interested in it for long, so why not just nip the enterprise in the bud.

Besides, the plan has been to fall back on poetry when, and if, I lose my connection to the Internet. When I no longer can enjoy the convenience of easy word-processing programs, then will be the time to spend my days on banging out short little poems, spending a day hammering into shape a few lines of ten or so syllables each.

Marilyn

Marilyn gave a heartfelt statement on what she was doing with her life shortly before she died. It is an argument against suicide, though not dispositive. Moods can bounce around. And it true that she was self-conscious about creating an appearance to others when she composed this statement. It is still a strong statement.

( Read more... )

Cats and Weather

I didn't know it was going to be another 100-degree day. Sammy came in on his own for a minute, and I let him back outside. I wish I had that move again. I would have kept him inside.

We had that few days of temperatures dropping a notch and of the air feeling a little autumnal, which led me to believe that the summer heatwave was over. I let myself be fooled.

* * *

1550

Hey, I got Sammy inside! It's late, but he will be spared three hard hours of that heat.

As for Ash, there still has not been any sight of her.

The Old Journal

I'm skimming through the 1991 entries for the Three Journal, looking for a few tidbits to salvage from the wreckage, but what agony it is. Such shit! Thinking about my 'poet' fantasies, I would have done better to write shit verses than to pen that garbage. It is so bland and vague, as well as utterly artless. Crap, man.

But it's all I have to work with now. I can see myself being tempted to avoid looking through that material and to just let it collect cobwebs in the closet, and focus on the blogging years, but for now I am willing to at least surf through the pages for some sparkly items.

Pop

Is it just me, or did Pop just get shriveled and wrinkly in the last couple of weeks. He is old enough that he presumably had much of this appearance for at least the last few years. Is it possible that I just didn't much notice it, being taken in by the happy illusion of his nimbleness and busy days of running around and having women over?

Now I can see that he really looks his age. It's a little scary. How much time do we have left to live the life we have been living?

For the record, by the way, he hasn't had any stayovers for the past two or three weeks.

The Image Over the Word

I am in the mood for a rant against the consolidation of the post-literate world, a conquest made more quickly and completely by the emergence and dominance of the Internet.

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It wasn’t always like this. The virtual world that took off in the mid 90's started as a place for words. Every person made a screen-name and then used text to communicate their ideas and feelings. But in an extremely accelerated manner the supremacy of text was weakened. First, by progressively smaller bursts of text (websites became blogs, became status updates, became 144 character tweets), and then through the enthronement of the image. Whether it is moving pictures (Youtube, Vimeo, Liveleak), or photo-sharing sites like Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat, it goes without saying that we are well on our way to communicating with each other by way of pictures.

[...]

But there is a group of storytellers who aren’t all that excited about this shift to images as the primary vehicle for the delivery of the story. We are the wordsmiths. The poets. The short story writers. The memoirists. The novelists. The journalists. Call us anachronistic. Call us conservative. Call us backward. Whether because we love words — the way they sound, the way they taste, the immensely lonely training we undergo in order to use them effectively — we aren’t very happy with this new image obsessed world. Many of us express our sorrow, our resentment, our rage, by polemicizing against anything that leads to the death of the word. Whether it is our presumptive godfather Jonathan Franzen bashing the internet, or our godmother Lydia Millet laying waste to the image-obsessed celebrity in her stunning short story collection Love and Infant Monkeys, we are engaged in a war (one that we are losing) to prevent the death of the word.

-- Ali Eteraz, "The War on Wordsmiths" at Medium.com

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Ash

Ash has made it back home and seems to be in fine health. Did she get lost? Was she hiding from a canine threat and was stuck in place for hours and hours? Or did she just feel like spending a holiday elsewhere for a day? I will never know.

The Trees

So that's what that sound was that I heard in my bedroom while I was reading. I thought the tied-up gate got loose. But no. An overhanging tree branch is dragging on the roof. It is over Pop's bedroom, but I can hear it quite clearly in my room, which is not good at all for the prospect of my sleep.

We have needed a good tree-pruning for a long time. Unfortunately, Pop regards that as a waste of money. He never got in the habit of making that kind of expenditure, and he supposedly does not see why he should start now. It would be a couple of hundred dollars well-spent to chop down all the over-extended tree branches. But he is in charge of the money and we must live by his dim lights. Though, in all fairness to him, I suppose we have never been as tight for money as we are now, and here he is suffering a steep decline in health, falling into decrepitness.